Big League Teague

When Michael Douglas, acting as producer, signed Lewis Teague to direct Jewel of the Nile, the $17 million sequel to Romancing the Stone, Teague had made five low-budget pictures. Risky perhaps, but Teague had filmed a gangster melodrama, The Lady in Red (1979); a social-cum-vigilante drama, Fighting Back (1982); and three horror pictures, Alligator (1980), Cujo (1983), and Cat's Eye (1985). Each was driven by an actionmenace mainspring, a centered facet of Jewel, leaving the question open as to whether Teague could do it again-only on a more complex scale. Douglas didn't give him much time to doubt himself.

"Yeah, it was a bit hectic," says Teague. "I had eight months to prepare, shoot, and edit the picture, and two months more to dub it, add sound effects, and prepare it for release. When we began shooting, last April, the script had already been rewritten many times, and the writers were on location [in the French Riviera and Morocco] for the shoot. That was my biggest problem, because it's a big picture, with a lot of special effects which required a certain amount of planning, story-boarding, and special equipment built. But I managed. I have some experience in that area. I started off working for Roger Corman on no-time schedules and no budgets; I made documentaries at KCET on very quick schedules; and I stepped in twice to replace other directors. On Fighting Back it was two weeks before starting principal photography, and Cujo had been shooting for two days when they interrupted production. I had to start from scratch with three-days of preparation....

'The scary thing about Jewel of the Nile is that it's a sequel to a film that grossed $75 million, so everybody's expectations are very high. It's one thing if a Roger Corman picture doesn't do very well nobody notices and you move on to the next one-but here, a lot of people are going to be watching to see how well you did. You have to constantly discipline yourself to ignore that."

Jewel moves romance novelist Joan Wilder (Kathleen Turner) and her dream man and action hero, Jack Colton (Michael Douglas), from Stone's Columbian jungle to the Sahara Desert. With fluid camera movements helping to create a fast-paced action format...